War Palace and Knee Pillow, Austria’s Destiny

Franz’s heroic words of “wanting everyone in Austria to have clothes to wear” were not empty words. With the expansion of the market space within the empire and the formation of a relatively stable cotton supply chain, clothing with the advantage of low prices will take advantage of favorable transportation conditions and flood into all parts of the country.

In this way, it can not only reduce production costs, but also greatly meet people's demand for daily necessities and stimulate employment.

At the same time, these clothes are also a weapon in the hands of the Austrian Empire. For example, Saxony has the strongest textile industry. Cotton is provided by Austria, and the market is dominated by Austria. As a middleman, it can only choose to follow Austria's footsteps.

In recent years, Prussia, the second child of the German Confederacy, has been in an uncomfortable state. Originally, its own pillar industry, the once glorious Silesian textile industry, was already in decline, and it had to face the trade dumping of the Confederacy by the giant British.

The German Customs Union was finally established, but the Austrian tiger came out halfway. Originally, the Prussians hoped to use state subsidies to support their own clothing industry to fight against the Austrians. However, the heavy blow from the Americans directly killed them.

Not only did it lose millions of talers, it also spent a lot of manpower and material resources, but it ended up with the only option being to sell the factory and machinery at a low price. What is even more difficult for them to accept is that Austria became the ultimate beneficiary of this large acquisition.

However, compared with the fiasco in the clothing market, Frederick William IV had another headache that troubled him more, and that was the dissatisfaction of the constitutionalists in Prussia.

The military led by the Juncker nobles held a tough attitude and advocated taking this opportunity to abolish the constitutionalists and attack and weaken those speculative businessmen, which could be described as killing two birds with one stone.

Due to the food crisis in previous years and the impact of the Austrian Empire joining the German Zollverein, the strength of Prussia's liberal constitutionalists was much weaker than in history. On the contrary, the voice of the Juncker landowners continued to grow louder.

However, William IV did not have the courage to break this fragile political balance. He was worried that without the restraint of the liberals, the conservatives and the military would be able to dominate the country and eventually escape the control of the monarch like a wild horse. He was even more afraid that this would repeat the tragedy of the French Revolution.

At the same time, another dangerous force was growing rapidly in Prussia: the radicals. These are people whose views are far more threatening than conservatives and liberals combined, such as their strong support for the abolition of the monarchy and its replacement with a republic.

In fact, not only Prussia but the entire German Confederation was filled with such voices. Even Austria was not immune to this.

This was especially serious in some small princely states, where even the political parties that ruled the country were republicans. This made William IV so frightened that he could not sleep at night. Therefore, he and the conservative leader Metternich jointly enforced the law across the country. The times are becoming more frequent.

But even so, the situation has not improved. He neither wants to anger those constitutionalists nor hand over the precious power in his hands. After thinking about it, I decided to be a deaf person and ignore those voices for the time being.

Although it is constantly challenged politically by radical ideological trends, in the economic and trade fields, Austria can be said to have achieved frequent successes.

After its ready-made clothes entered the German Customs Union and the Apennine Customs Union, they also poured into Serbia, Wallachia, Moravia, and the Balkan territories under Ottoman jurisdiction along the Danube River's transportation convenience.

Unfortunately, this batch of ready-to-wear clothes didn’t cause much of a stir in the area. The main reason is that the living standards in these countries and regions are really too low.

The poor locals prefer to buy coarse fabrics rather than ready-made clothes. Although the profit in the fabric business is lower, as the saying goes, a fly's legs also have flesh, not to mention that this is just a stepping stone.

In fact, Franz's real intention in urging the opening of the Balkan market was to export culture so as to cultivate a group of spiritual Austrians.

After the Turkish-Egyptian War, Egypt and the Ottomans had opened their doors to Austria. The only trouble was that the clothes sold to them needed special modifications to make them more in line with the local aesthetics.

In fact, through the years of "Westernization Movement" of Ali and the Ottoman Sultans, these two places have cultivated a large group of spiritual Europeans, so Austrian goods can unexpectedly sell well here.

However, Egypt and Ottoman also had their own considerations in doing so. With the war in the Near East coming to an end, the French have temporarily withdrawn from the competition. As for the remaining two powers, Britain and Russia, one hopes to dominate their market, and the other has never concealed its ambition for their land.

Although in comparison, the British's methods are gentler than those of the Russians, their trade hegemony still makes Turkey and Egypt somewhat unable to bear it.

At first, the goods imported by the British seemed to be of high quality and low price. However, after the French, a strong competitor, withdrew, they took off their masks and revealed their bloodthirsty fangs.

The first thing to increase in price was weapons, followed by cotton cloth and saltpeter. In just one year, the prices of commodities other than grain and wood almost doubled.

The grain and timber trade was dominated by the Russians. They did not interfere with the prices, but the output volume was really unacceptable to the Ottoman Empire.

Magid could only borrow money from the British to build ships, and a large amount of grain became war reserves.

Meguid was not an incompetent monarch, and he quickly recognized the problem, which was that the Ottoman Empire was becoming increasingly dependent on Britain and was getting less and less profit from trade.

In the past, a high-quality carpet could be exchanged for twenty guns, but now it can only be exchanged for ten, and they are still old-fashioned flintlock guns, not the latest percussion guns.

Meguid knew that this was what would happen if there was only one tiger in the mountains, so he hoped that another tiger would appear and let them compete so that the Ottoman Empire could obtain the maximum profit.

In fact, the first person he thought of was the French. Although they had been supporters of Egypt, Magid believed that France was the only country in the world that had the ability to compete with England on the economic, political and military levels.

Not only him, many of the Ottoman high-level people who have been to Europe are full of admiration for France, a country that almost single-handedly ruled Europe.

From a historical perspective, the Ottoman Empire was at its most glorious when it relied on the "Holy Alliance" formed with its half-brother France to suppress the Habsburgs. I think of the time when Suleiman the Magnificent devoured thousands of miles like a tiger, defeated Hungary, beheaded its king, besieged Vienna several times, and made all European countries pay tribute.

Unfortunately, the French did not intend to give their once close comrade-in-arms the opportunity to revisit their old dreams, and ruthlessly rejected Magid's proposal. Guizot, the leader of the pro-British faction, even reached an agreement with the British to jointly control commodity prices.

Russian products are not competitive at all, and no normal person would choose Russian products. The Prussians' products were superior to those of their eastern neighbors, but their scarcity and high shipping costs made them prohibitive.

General goods were simply not enough to offset the huge impact of British goods on Near Eastern trade. At this time, there was no German craftsmanship that would be talked about by later generations. Prussia is now known as Yiwu in Europe, and their products are famous for their low-quality and low-quality imitations.

Originally, due to the feud between the two parties, Austria itself was not in Magid's consideration. He had no good impression of this country. In addition, the other party's behavior of taking advantage of the situation during the war in the Near East deepened his disgust.

But when he saw those cheap ready-made clothes, he was shaken. Magid soon showed his agility as a qualified monarch, and he decided to let the Austrians join this beast competition in order to lower the price of British goods.

As a result, with the official encouragement of the Ottoman Empire, Austrian products quickly became popular in the Near East. The British immediately felt the pressure and had to cut prices on their goods, causing profits to plummet.

You must know that the Anglo-Saxons have never been players who abide by the rules, so they immediately found the Americans and prepared to solve their competitors at the source.

Previously, the newly inaugurated President John Tyler made a request (Harris died of illness) to redefine the boundaries of the United States and British North America. The British, who wanted something from the other side, had to agree to their demands and promised not to cross the border again and invade American territory.

Soon the clothing products of the Austrian Empire withdrew from the Anatolian market.

Just when the British were complacent about achieving their goal, they didn't know that this was actually a deal reached by representatives of Franz and John Taylor, making the latter once again owe the former a huge favor.

The Americans won the border negotiations, and the Austrians successfully completed their plan to show weakness to the British. After all, Franz doesn't want to be remembered by the British. What Austria needs most now is time. Magid successfully used the goods of his former enemy to suppress the price of British goods.

After this game of chess, everyone felt that they had won.